July is about growing plants to eat.
(This month I’m looking at edible gardens – an allotment, herb gardens, a potager or even a single tomato plant. If you want to go bigger then why not a rice terrace in China, a field of corn in the prairies or lavender in Provence; you decide )
A week or so ago I was lucky enough to spot an open garden for the Cornwall Wildlife Trust which featured a herb garden and a patchwork potager. Given the theme this month it seemed like a good opportunity to find some fresh photos of an edible garden. I will write more about the actual garden (Trevoole Farm) on my Cornish blog, but for now we’ll have a potter around the patchwork potager.
A potager is really a combination of a traditional English kitchen garden (which always used to be consigned to the back of the garden) and the style and elegance of a French garden. Plants are chosen for their edible and ornamental nature and put together in such a way to look beautiful whilst providing food for the table.
A potager can be any design, from traditional knot gardens to informal cottage garden style. Even vegetables can be ornamental, think of artichokes. Consider each variety on its own merit. Use purple cauliflowers instead of the usual white ones, heritage varieties of beans and peas, colourful heirloom tomatoes which range from white to almost black; consider the shape and structure of a plant and remember trailing plants can be trained to grow vertically. Plant companion flowers to encourage pollinators (bees and hoverflies) on to the plot or to attract nature’s invaders such as aphids and blackfly away from the edible plants. Marigolds, dwarf French marigolds (tagetes), poached-egg plants (Limnanthes Douglasii), nasturtiums, borage and daisies not only look good, but some of them taste good too.
If you would like to join in with Garden Photography then please take a look at my Garden Photography Page. No complicated rules 🙂
- Create your own post and title it July: The Edible Garden
- Include a link to this page in your post so others can find it too
- Add the tag “GardenChallenge” so everyone can find the posts easily in the WP Reader
- Get your post in by the end of the month, as the new theme comes out on the first Sunday in August.
- Please visit the sites in the comments to see what others are posting.
Earth laughs in flowers 
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I was pottering too 🙂
https://restlessjo.me/2016/07/21/come-into-the-garden-maude/
Thank you for the opportunity,loved doing this.below is the link to edible garden challenge. https://crystalamay.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/moms-garden/
Your post is beautiful, it wistfully reminds me of balmy summer garden days in Europe ( when you get them!) and makes me long to be out of 40+ temperatures…I finally found something edible (slightly bigger than a garden though) in this heat….https://mytravelmiddleeastandbeyond.com/2016/07/22/july-the-edible-garden/
This is a lovely colourful plot and your first photos remind me that, yet again, I have forgotten to plant sweet peas! I didn’t know that nasturtiums draw the bugs away from other things – maybe I need some of them in my garden. 🙂
You can have some of mine, I seem to have hundreds!
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